A chaos-based encryption technique to protect ECG packets for time critical telecardiology applications

Electrocardiography (ECG) signal is popularly used for diagnosing cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). However, in recent times ECG is being used for identifying person. As ECG signals contain sensitive private health information along with details for person identification, it needs to be encrypted before transmission through publicmedia.Moreover, this encryption must be applied with minimal delay for authenticating CVD patients, as time is critical for saving CVD affected patient’s life.Within this paper, we propose the usage of multi-scroll chaos to encrypt ECG packets. ECG packets are being encrypted by the mobile phones using the chaos key by patients’ subscribed in tele-cardiology applications. On the other hand, doctors and hospital attendants receive the encrypted ECG packets, which can be decrypted using the same chaos key. Using the techniques described in this paper, end-to-end security can be applied to wireless tele-cardiology application, with minimal processing. Our experimentation with 12 ECG segments shows that with multi-scroll chaos implementation, CVD patients remain completely unidentified, upholding patients’ privacy and preventing spoof attacks. Most importantly, the proposed method is 18 times faster than permutation-based ECG encoding, 25 times faster than wavelet-based ECG annonymization techniques and 31 times faster than noise-based ECG obfuscation techniques, establishing the proposed technique as the fastest ECG encryption system according to the literature. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.